Thoughts on unemployment
Standard economic theory is that minimum wage laws result in unemployment, because they set an artificial floor on the price of labor, and therefore preclude people whose labor is worth less on the market than the minimum wage from finding a job.
The point of the minimum wage, though, is that it's supposed to be the minimum that you need to survive. If you make less than that value, you're basically living in poverty.
To illustrate this, the minimum wage in the U.S. is currently $6.55. Working a full-time (40 hours/week) job at this rate would give you an annual income of $13,624. The poverty level for an individual in the continental U.S. is currently defined as an annual income of less than $10,400. So working that hypothetical minimum wage job would put you somewhat above poverty-as long as you're an individual. If you have one dependent, the line is $14,000, so you're in poverty.
(And if you're earning the minimum wage, chances are that you won't be working full time, and that you won't be employed for an entire year, so your actual income will probably be even lower than that calculation.)
So if people were allowed to work for less than the minimum wage, they would be earning less than they need to survive. Now, conservatives will likely argue that the poverty line is set too high, and that people could survive perfectly well on an income less than that. But the exact numbers aren't the point. The point is to illustrate that, by their argument against the minimum wage, the economics of supply and demand do make possible a situation where the market value of a person's labor is less than the cost of her survival.
Or, in other words, where that person's labor has no economic value. The economy doesn't need her.
So why does the American work ethic put such value on making people find work, when, by the ostensibly objective evaluation of the market, their work just isn't valuable?
To my mind, the fact that unemployment is even a meaningful economic concept is symptomatic of something very wrong with the wage economy and the ethic of work that supports it.
(The situation becomes even more silly when one realizes that-given the collapsing bridges, breaking levees, and crumbling schools that characterize the infrastructure of America-there really is plenty of useful work that people could be doing. It's just not "valuable" to the economy, insofar as no one with money is willing to pay them to do it. The New Deal and the Obama stimulus plan were sort of designed to address that weirdness, but what such programs can accomplish is probably pretty limited as long as they're working within the present money system.)
The point of the minimum wage, though, is that it's supposed to be the minimum that you need to survive. If you make less than that value, you're basically living in poverty.
To illustrate this, the minimum wage in the U.S. is currently $6.55. Working a full-time (40 hours/week) job at this rate would give you an annual income of $13,624. The poverty level for an individual in the continental U.S. is currently defined as an annual income of less than $10,400. So working that hypothetical minimum wage job would put you somewhat above poverty-as long as you're an individual. If you have one dependent, the line is $14,000, so you're in poverty.
(And if you're earning the minimum wage, chances are that you won't be working full time, and that you won't be employed for an entire year, so your actual income will probably be even lower than that calculation.)
So if people were allowed to work for less than the minimum wage, they would be earning less than they need to survive. Now, conservatives will likely argue that the poverty line is set too high, and that people could survive perfectly well on an income less than that. But the exact numbers aren't the point. The point is to illustrate that, by their argument against the minimum wage, the economics of supply and demand do make possible a situation where the market value of a person's labor is less than the cost of her survival.
Or, in other words, where that person's labor has no economic value. The economy doesn't need her.
So why does the American work ethic put such value on making people find work, when, by the ostensibly objective evaluation of the market, their work just isn't valuable?
To my mind, the fact that unemployment is even a meaningful economic concept is symptomatic of something very wrong with the wage economy and the ethic of work that supports it.
(The situation becomes even more silly when one realizes that-given the collapsing bridges, breaking levees, and crumbling schools that characterize the infrastructure of America-there really is plenty of useful work that people could be doing. It's just not "valuable" to the economy, insofar as no one with money is willing to pay them to do it. The New Deal and the Obama stimulus plan were sort of designed to address that weirdness, but what such programs can accomplish is probably pretty limited as long as they're working within the present money system.)